Check out episode 23, Building Ministry with Slow Change: “Trust the Process” featuring Mark DeVries. From his beginning as a part-time youth ministry consultant to now having worked with almost 800 congregations, Mark has realized one thing: slow and sustainable change leads to successful ministry. But what is ‘sustainable change’ and how can churches achieve it? Mark uses his extensive background as a youth minister and ministry consultant to give us a glimpse into creating successful ministries of ANY type

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77pjBNt48g4[/embedyt]

The post Building Ministry with Slow Change: “Trust the Process” appeared first on Ministry Architects.

Any young adult living in the Millennial generation has experienced this situation in some form or another, imagine you’re part of it right now. It’s finally the weekend, and your friends are busy preparing an evening out. The five of you haven’t been together in, what feels like, months and you’re eager to connect. Though you’ve been planning this evening for weeks, you actually don’t have any actual plans yet, you’ve all just cleared the schedule for tonight. Now that it’s late afternoon, everyone is busy trying to make this plan happen over the world’s most exciting and efficient method of communication: group texting!

It’s like all your friends are together in the same room, having a very tedious and slow conversation. One friend suggests dinner and dancing, another suggests drinks downtown, another feels like staying in tonight so the rest of you are working hard to get them to change their mind.

But then, something happens. A neighbor stops by, knocks on the door and strikes up a conversation with you for a bit. Before you know it, you’ve lost fifteen minutes to the neighbor and back in the group text you’ve missed 42 sets of plans and 56 arguments. Before the night is over the plans will change 14 more times after you leave the house.

While some might call Millennials indecisive, fickle or even lazy in their commitment, the truth is that Millennials are increasingly mobile and transient, to the point where they are comfortable leaving the house without knowing the final destination, trusting that a destination will present itself when it needs too.

According to the US Bureau, 14.19% of Americans move every year, but a whopping 30% of 20-somethings will move this year. It’s challenging for churches trying to reach Millennials when one third of their audience will move away each year, bringing in a brand new third of unfamiliar faces. If you’re running a ministry targeting millennials, that means you will have a completely different group of people every three years.

Many have given up trying any kind of ministry in their church for young adults because they’ve been unable to keep them around long enough to build a fledgling ministry into something stable, long-lasting that produces fruit. I’ve seen many next generation ministries give up because the transient culture of young adults just won’t seem to respond to the program they are trying to build.

But maybe we don’t have to pack up the shop and call it a day. Maybe we have to understand and work with this transient culture instead of working against it. Churches can pay attention to life in the mobile culture and adjust to different concepts in their discipleship approaches. Here are some key concepts you can take into this kind of discipleship.

Recruit, Don’t Advertise

One method most churches rely on in growing their discipleship programs is to advertise regularly. Bulletin announcements, bulletin boards, video announcements are often designed to share the open invite to small groups, women’s ministries, men’s prayer breakfasts and other discipleship opportunities. The underlying assumption in this method is to assume that everyone is just looking around for something to engage their spirituality and all you have to do is tell them it’s there and they’ll show up.

Millennials won’t work that way. They’ve developed high levels of expertise in filtering out any and all advertisements in their life. After all, they can’t even open up a game on their smartphone without advertisements cluttering the visual landscape. The more effective approach is to recruit them into discipleship opportunities. Intentionally seek them out and draw them in, one by one. Certainly fishing with a pole is slower and results in fewer participants, but you will, ultimately be more successful if you don’t wait for them to come to you.

Small Cohorts, Not Large Experiences

Discipleship experiences do not have to be huge to be attractive to young adults. We’ve spent a lot of years training our youth ministries to think “bigger and better” in order to get teenagers walking in the door. Working with a transient culture means we probably will never have massive amounts of young adults in any one place at a single time. So shrink the scale and focus on taking a specific group of people through a shared experience, allowing them to experience peer-learning and experiences as they journey together.

Guide, Don’t Teach

Millennials thrive in self-directed learning environments. They have access to just about anything they could ever want to know, see, hear, or experience in their life. They are experienced at following up on their thoughts and learning new information on their terms.

Here’s a little experiment to try. Spend an evening with a group of Millennials and remove the smart phones, tablets, and laptops from the room. As the conversation rolls along through the night, ask the room to pay attention to how often they were tempted to look up a piece of information but couldn’t. Who was the actor in that movie we just mentioned? What was the score of that game last night? What really is the distance between the earth and the sun? Millennials can find all the information they could ever want, and often do so without thinking.

So rather than teach them more information, guide them in their desire to learn more about faith. Point them in the right direction, provide them with great resources, process the ways in which faith is becoming real in their life. Guides ask great questions and listen well and respond to where they are leading.

Short-term Experiences, Not Long-Term Commitments

No one likes contracts. Cellphone companies and marketers know their customers want flexibility and the freedom to make choices on their own terms.

When living out discipleship opportunities with such a transient culture, the shorter the commitment, the higher the commitment. Avoid 16-week discipleship classes and small groups that go on forever without end. Instead, think about one-off experiences and 4-week follow-up commitments. Perhaps a weekend of intense retreat will get you more impact than a year’s worth of weekly meetings. Millennial ministry opportunities are constantly launching.

Challenge, Not Just Depth

Millennials are actively seeking out truth, and they expect truth to be deep and impactful. If a millennial visits our church and observes us skating along the surface of real impact and transformation for the sake of drawing people in the doors, they’ll want to leave. But it’s not just “trying to be cool” that turns a Millennial away. They also can sense when a church has been mired in routine and tradition so long that it no longer has impact, and those around them are just going through the motions. Believe it or not, what draws more Millennials through our doors is our willingness to dive deep into the spiritual truth of the gospel for the sake of changing lives, even if it’s messy.

But more than just pulling out deep theological conversations or raising the level of intellectualism in our churches, the deeper value lies around not just going deep, but in presenting something that’s challenging.

Pope Francis is a great example of a church leader gaining the admiration of Millennials.  Chosen in a conclave in 2013 after the unusual resignation of Pope Benediction XVI, Pope Francis immediately began to make waves more by the way he lived than by the words he spoke.  Sometimes referred to as “Pope Francis the Revolutionary,” this iconic leader of the Catholic Church has rejected fancy robes in exchange for modest attire.  He has stooped low to wash the feet of female prisoners, and he has transformed the mansion of a German bishop into a soup kitchen.

In his first papal exhortation he wrote: “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting, and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

Millennials aren’t simply looking for deeper theology, they are looking for a faith that challenges them to change their lives to live for something more.

From Gathering to Sending

What if your Millennial ministry was unabashedly aimed towards sending young adults away from your church instead of gathering them to it?

We often think the evangelism and discipleship have different ends, one to attract others to the truth of God, and the other to gather those who’ve been attracted to the truth around it’s transformational power. We get them here, then we keep them here. For many of us, discipleship has been about the gathering, about the keeping, about the long-term stability of spiritual growth. But the transient culture of Millennials is forcing us to understand the nuances of discipleship that comes from equipping and sending.

We know Millennials won’t stay in one place for long. Their approach to the world is transient, the housing market they’ve grown up in is unstable, and their experience in the job market has proven to be unpredictable. So let’s spend our time preparing young adults for these very changes, fully aware that they’ll soon be leaving for another faith community, perhaps near, or maybe far away. If our perspective is to prepare these young adults with the faith tools and experiences they’ll need in the next iteration of their lives, we can find our discipleship much more successful and become sending churches, not just gathering churches.

The post You will lose one third of your millennials this year… now what? appeared first on Ministry Architects.

Currently, my favorite reality show is “Extreme Cheapskates.” This show takes something as simple as “trying to save some money” and finds the most outrageous examples to put on TV. Viewers tune in to watch families ration their food and toilet paper and even mix one part juice to five parts water so things will go further. One mom even went so far as to count out the cereal for her toddler son: “We’re going to give you fourteen,” she said as she counted out 14 Cheerios. She gently reminded him as he hungrily gobbled up his meager pile, “And remember, you need to eat all your Cheerios, or next time you only get twelve.”

While counting Cheerios and sheets of toilet paper may sound extreme, there is something respectable to most Americans about trying to save a buck or two. It feels responsible. It feels successful. It also feels like what most churches try to do with their young adult ministry. Churches often look for something that’s quick, that’s cheap and that will give them the most bang for their buck.

The struggle to reach 18-30 year olds is not unique to your church. Churches everywhere are having these conversations at some level of leadership and even the churches that look like they are succeeding would claim to be “still figuring it out.” At some point churches just start trying ideas hoping something will work, like throwing darts at a wall and then painting dartboards around them. One of the most common darts thrown is this one: “let’s get the youth worker to do it.”

More often than not, the easiest and least thoughtful method of ministering to Millennials is to walk down the hall, find the youth director’s office and add another title to that nameplate: “Director of Youth AND Young Adults.” It’s also a big mistake.

BOTTOMS UP

Let’s be honest, starting with the youth ministry director doesn’t seem like a bad idea.  After all, they might have already graduated a few classes of high school students, in addition to likely being a “young person” themselves. They might even hold the record having the most relationships with anyone under the age of thirty in your congregation.  It makes sense that we would engage this person in the mission to Millennials.

A local youth worker named Jesse called me up to have coffee a few weeks ago. His church had decided it was time to do something to reach young adults so they had taken the very common next step of asking the youth worker to start a college ministry. Jesse bought me a cup of coffee and asked me as many questions as he could about how to pull this off.

Now Jesse seems to me like a pretty talented guy. He’s been in youth ministry for a few years. He plays guitar in his own band. His marriage is about a year old, and he has plenty of relationships with other young people just like him. He has all the qualifications almost any church would look for in a person they want to head up such a task of reaching young adults.

But I believe that Jesse is destined to fail at this task.

Here’s why…

It’s not because he is a bad guy. It’s not because he doesn’t have the skills. It’s not because he doesn’t care. It’s because the approach his church is taking is fundamentally flawed from the start.

First, it’s tough to succeed as an afterthought. The Millennial generation is the largest single generation in the history of the planet, and our priorities seem drastically misaligned if we think we can be effective with such a massive group of people when we are unwilling to intentionally resource them. Making Millennials another plate for the youth director to keep spinning is a quick way to ensure lots of frustration and little reward. It’s really the choice to say “we hope this works . . . but we don’t really care.”

Like trying to stay warm under a 4-foot by 4-foot blanket, under-resourced ministries often struggle to maintain success longer than six months to a year. We might respect people who are thrifty, but reaching Millennials is going to require more intentional resourcing if we are to succeed. With all of the opportunity the Millennials bring to the church, it almost seems insulting to design ministry to them “on the cheap.” They deserve more than becoming a caveat to the youth ministry.

The second problem is that youth directors aren’t equipped to do what we really need them to do.  They are busy doing something else… working with middle and high school students. It’s perfectly normal for a successful youth worker to do what they do best when handed the task of reaching Millennials and simply copy the style of ministry we used with high school students.

Ministry to young adults is holistically different from youth ministry. Youth ministry aims to train and equip teens for life as mature Christian adults. That same purpose, copied and carried over to ministry with young adults, brings dangerous results. With this viewpoint, the focus will never be on integrating Millennials into the adult life and leadership of the church.

As a result, youth ministers often end up creating an alternative universe for young adults that continues to offer age-segregated ministry all the while keeping them in a “sub-adult” category- never allowing them to “graduate” into the church as a whole.  This approach has the potential to alienate young adults from the church body as a whole until they marry, have children, establish a career and finally become “real church members.” It’s debilitating to the maturation process of young adults and for the church as a whole.

George Barna gives us some discouraging statistics around this reality:

The most potent data regarding disengagement is that a majority of twentysomethings – 61% of today’s young adults – had been churched at one time during their teen years but they are now spiritually disengaged (i.e., not actively attending church, reading the Bible, or praying).

This method of extending the youth ministry ensures we will keep using the wrong approach with Millennials. Rather than leverage the wonder and mystery of this generation and bring their voice to the table, we box it up and place these young adults on hold asking the youth minister to corral them and try to keep them entertained – much like we once did with our teenagers.

PASSING THE BATON

If you watched the 2012 summer Olympics in London, you saw a new world record set in the 4×100 meter relay set by the Jamaican sprinters. In a race that has historically been dominated by Americans, a strong team of record-setting sprinters from Jamaica held off the US team and dominated in the last leg of the race for the gold medal.

In a race that included four men on the team and lasted only 36.84 seconds, the need for precision was intense. Without a doubt, the reason this team could post that time and win the gold medal came down to the hand-offs. Every single hand-off was precise, on target, with no time or energy wasted.  When elite relay teams manage a race with three perfect hand-offs, they’ve got a chance at gold.

As we look at engaging Millennials into the life and leadership of our congregations, the hand-offs our churches make are extremely important too.

If we can manage a good hand-off from childhood to middle school and middle school to high school, we have a better chance of success.

If we can manage a better hand-off from student ministry into college and young adulthood, our churches have a stronger opportunity to grow the kingdom.

And if our churches can navigate a smooth transition of the 18-30 year old generation into the overall life of a church, we might find our older generations crossing the finish line with their own faith having successfully passed the baton to others along the way.

But in order to do that, we have to move the baton through each exchange zone. You’ll never see the number three runner continue to race to the finish line himself. You’ll never see anyone simply extend their own leg of the race because they don’t have a strong runner in the next section. The baton has to make it all the way through each leg.

Instead of trying to figure out why we are dropping the baton, churches have chosen to extend the current leg of the race. Rather than think intentionally about how Millennials cross the finish line, we’re spending more time extending youth ministry.

Youth ministry can’t be our model for young adult ministry. Youth Directors can’t be our knee-jerk solution to providing leadership for college ministry. It’s the wrong model, it’s the wrong resourcing and it sends the wrong message. Millennials need to be valued, they need an intentional strategy and they need to be engaged from the top-down in our churches. Approaching them as an add-on or with by throwing darts at the non-existent target is a strategy that ensures Millennials will never engage at your church.

The post Reimagining Young Adult Ministry, Part One appeared first on Ministry Architects.

For years, the Ministry Architects team has been helping people build sustainable ministries by taking a uniquely systemic approach. Like the 11 or so systems of the human body, every ministry is made up of a complex system of systems that determine its overall health. And though most churches typically do well at pieces of each system, most fail miserably at becoming a healthy, collaborative community of multiple systems working in concert.

Most people agree that, at least on some level, systems are important. Maybe they’ve read a little Ed Friedman or they’ve studied a little Bowen theory. But, if tasked with naming the specific systems required for sustaining a healthy ministry, so many leaders default to saying they’re ethereal and abstract. They’re unlistable, if you will.

Our experience is quite the opposite. We believe the systems required for sustaining a healthy ministry are very specific. And definitely able to be named, created, and attended to. Through our work with thousands of ministries and churches across the country, we’ve compiled a list of the essential systems every church or ministry organization needs to be sustainable. Hopefully, this quick introduction will get the conversation started and prompt more and more ministries to have a much clearer picture of what healthy systems might look like.

I’ll introduce them simply with a name, followed by a one-sentence description.

1. The Database System allows us to stay appropriately connected with the many different kinds of people connected to our ministry, so that we don’t communicate the same way with the lifelong member family as we do with the 15-year-old from Des Moines who visited the youth lock-in three years ago.
2. The Program Calendar System ensures that we are not simply reacting to the most urgent demands but are also building a rhythm into the work we are called to do together, establishing a steady drumbeat for delivering consistently well-executed programs that participants experience as well worth the time invested.
3. The Preventative Maintenance System builds the ongoing maintenance of our ministry, attending to all of the behind-the-scenes needs. 
4. The Communication System pulls together the multiple streams of communication (both from the ministry and to the ministry) into a coherent, strategic, integrated message that actually produces desired results. 
5. The Volunteer System provides a congregation with a hernia-free process for recruiting, equipping, and dispatching volunteers into roles that are life-giving for the volunteers and make an impact for the cause of Christ.
6. The Visioning System defines for a church where it wants to go and provides benchmarks for how it hopes to get there.
7. The Hospitality System establishes clear processes to ensure that every person visiting a church or a ministry experiences a surprisingly welcoming environment, as well as consistent, comfortable follow-up contacts, appropriate to the DNA of that ministry.
8. The Staff Development System provides a healthy eco-system for the paid staff of a ministry to thrive in their ministries, sustain their own emotional and spiritual health, while at the same time, staying highly engaged and productive in their positions.
9. The Momentum Events System builds implementation teams that pull off effective, well-attended events, free of frustration of franticity and volunteers working at cross-purposes.
10. The Financial System maximizes the generous investment of donors through faithful tracking and expenditure of funds, moving expressions of need, and meaningful expressions of gratitude.
11. The Innovation System points a ministry in the direction of its future, welcoming outside the box thinking from a generation without a long history in the organization.
12. The Compliance System ensures that all legal requirements related to the church are ministry are met, including background checks, payroll filings, licenses, etc.
13. The Integration System links together the various departments and ministry efforts to remove silos and ensure the healthy, appropriate integration of the generations and the varied strands of ministry.
14. The Missions System keeps the ministry always looking beyond the goal of its own survival and looking toward fulfilling its mission in the world.
15. The Discipleship System identifies explicitly how the varied efforts of a church or ministry work together to deepen and strengthen the faith of those involved.
16. The Growth System provides an intentional process for outwardly focused communication designed to connect with and engage those not yet a part of the organization.
    
17. The Facilities System ensures the faithful maintenance of any space utilized by the enterprise, including capital improvements and on-going maintenance.

In the average ministry, what I find absolutely amazing is that these systems are almost always assumed but seldom built. The predictable result has been frustration, sideways energy, and volunteer-and-staff burnout at epidemic proportions. I have to wonder how many emergencies and crises in the church could be drastically reduced (or avoided all together) if churches simply took the time to invest in these systems, rather than expect them to be magically present without any deliberate effort.

As I often confess when I teach on Sustainable Ministry, systems are, of course, not the treasure; they are the clay pots (II Corinthians 4:7). But as long as our desire is to faithfully steward the treasure of the gospel through our organizations, we will need these systems, these jars of clay, to help us.

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Mark served as the Associate Pastor for Youth and Their Families at First Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee for 28 years. Though Mark resigned his position as youth pastor in 2014, after a year away, he plans to return to First Presbyterian as a volunteer associate pastor.

Mark is the author of a number of books, including Sustainable Youth Ministry (IVP, 2008), Family-Based Youth Ministry (IVP, Revised and Expanded, 2004) and 2011 releases, Before You Hire a Youth Pastor and The Indispensable Youth Pastor (Group Publishing), both co-authored with YMA Vice-President, Jeff Dunn-Rankin.  Mark served as the General Editor for the 2013 release,  Letters to a Youth Worker (CYMT, 2013).  Mark and his wife, Susan, co-authored a marriage book (with their good friends, Robert & Bobbie Wolgemuth) entitled  The Most Important Year in a Woman’s Life/ The Most Important Year in a Man’s Life (Zondervan, 2003). Their marriage book has recently been re-released as two separate gift books, one for the bride and one for the groom, called What Every Bride Needs to Know, and What Every Groom Needs to Know. (Zondervan, 2013).

Mark serves as the chairman of the board for the Center for Youth Ministry Training, a two-year residential, masters-level, youth ministry training program based in Nashville. He also serves on the Alumni Board for Princeton Theological Seminary.  Mark is a presenter for Homeword’s “Understanding Your Teenager” seminars.  And in addition to partnering occasionally with popular Christian musician, Mark Schultz, Mark is a frequent seminar speaker, training youth leaders at both the Youth Specialties’ National Youth Workers Convention and the Simply Youth Ministry Youth Ministry Conference.

Mark lives in Nashville with Susan, his wife of over 30 years, and they have three grown children: Adam and his wife, Sara, Debbie and her husband, Trey, and Leigh. Mark and Susan have three grandchildren, Parish, Nealy and Liam.

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